Abstract

The global economic crisis kept most governments predictably busy in 2008. Their most urgent task was to stabilise and, if possible, recapitalise their respective banking sectors. This was made easier in virtually every case by the (possibly surprising, but in some ways understandable) reluctance of opposition parties, once it became clear just how serious things were, to criticise those in power either for contributing to the emergency in the first place or for the quality of their response. Iceland, of course, was a special case: there it was obvious that the main government party, by freeing up the financial sector and then failing to regulate it properly, was to blame; moreover, it was manifestly incapable of doing much more than looking on as the country’s wealth bled away amid a welter of arguably hypocritical international condemnation. The Republicans in the United States, too, clearly suffered an electoral backlash at the hands of voters feeling the consequences of a financial and economic meltdown which the Bush Administration arguably did less than it might have done to mitigate.